


thirty-two feet per second i increase

by amalthea (Wren_Song), Wren_Song



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-05-19
Updated: 2014-01-12
Packaged: 2017-12-12 07:22:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/808864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wren_Song/pseuds/amalthea, https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wren_Song/pseuds/Wren_Song
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Primrose Everdeen was the eldest sister.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Primrose loves Katniss, who is Seam dark and Seam true and sees everything. 

“Where are you going?” Katniss asks, frowning, and Prim kisses her forehead.

“Nowhere,” Prim lies.

****

…

Prim hates this bed, specifically. She hates the threads of sheets she could never afford and the softness of a mattress that barely creaks. She digs her fingers in, hating it. There’s hot breath on the back of her neck. There’s weight on her hips. She hates this.

Hating this doesn’t mean that she won’t keep coming back, again and again. Hating this doesn’t mean that she doesn’t kiss Cray on the mouth and smile shyly when he asks to see her again. Hating this doesn’t mean Katniss starves.

Prim is Town light and Town deceitful. Prim is _pretty_ , Town or Seam, and she looks tiredly at her face in Cray’s polished mirror and thinks of cutting it off.

****

…

Prim has her name in the Reaping fifteen times. Katniss has hers in only once.

“Don’t be scared,” Prim says.

“I’m not,” Katniss says, defiant and naïve, and Prim is so glad that her little sister gets to live like that. 

****

…

Katniss hates blood and fuss. She’s happier with frogs in hand and dirt between her toes, and Prim lets her run wild no matter what the neighbors say. Prim never got to be wild. She watches Katniss wrestle Gale in their yard and knows she’s done the right thing.

Their mother is a ghost Prim remembers to feed because she’s a good girl, still, but their mother is locked away in a place no one can touch. Prim is all right with that. She’s made her peace, because there’s no purpose to holding a grudge. It burns out what people need to stay alive. She tells Katniss their mother is sick, and it’s true. It’s just not a sickness most understand.

Prim holds them all up, healer in the daylight and seller after dark. Prim gives and gives, because Prim has a heart too wide and hopeful for their lives.

“Dandelions,” Prim said, once upon a long time ago, rooting up plants with Katniss, “They’re edible. You’ll like them.”

Her little sister, all bone and ruin. Her little sister, heartbroken and grieving.

So Prim went to Cray when she was twelve with stuffing in her shirt. She hates it, but she’s never been sorry, and one day she’ll be able to set up real business on her own without the slippery help of the Head Peacekeeper. And she manages, because no one but the jealous would ever call her a whore. The Merchants might not want to give her the time of day, but after the sun goes down where else will they get the herbs and tinctures for their most embarrassing conditions? Who else will help anyone?

She has a cat and a goat, to go with her sister and mother. Creatures biting and fierce, creatures dull and senseless. Buttercup slams against her ribs when she curls up on the floor after Cray, and Prim cries into his coarse fur. Lady ambles stupidly across their meager patch of grass, and Katniss pulls too hard on her teats, but Prim can’t be there all the time.

“Katydid,” Prim murmurs, hugging Katniss against her on the nights she can sleep, “Be good.”

Katniss chirps like a cricket. Prim loves her so much; she loves her more than she could ever love anything else, her fierce and fearless sister.

****

…

“ _I volunteer!_ ” Prim screams, too high and too light, but it doesn’t matter, not at all, because Rory drags Katniss back while she bites and claws at him, and Prim goes forward. She goes forward.

They don’t get to have Katniss. They can have anything else, even her life, but not Katniss. 

Then they take Rye Mellark and Prim knows she’ll have to die, but that’s all right. She saved Kat. That’s all she needs.

****

…

What’s Rye Mellark to her, anyway?

She tried to go to Cray when she was eleven, the first time. There was nothing else left for her. Kat’s baby clothes were in tatters and she’d sold everything that was left to them but what they needed to stay alive. More than that, actually. Prim huddled across from the garbage across from the Mellark bakery and wished she was brave enough to try.

“Hey,” Rye said, shoving bread into her nerveless hands, “Run. My mother will—just go.”

So Prim went, clutching the warmth of rich, hearty bread to her stark ribs. 

He gave it to her because she’s beautiful and she’s sympathetic, Prim rationalizes. He fed her because he expected a return. Except—except, he never has, not once. He’s stayed funny and irreverent and apparently oblivious to her, and Prim just wants the right kind of people to live. It’s not her. But it might be Rye and Katniss. 

He has a little brother just Kat’s age. Prim doesn’t know how to get jaded, not after all this time. She doesn’t know how not to care.

Katniss made her promise to come home, but Prim knows she won’t.

****

…

“My little brother has the biggest crush on your sister,” Rye says, tightly, sitting as far from her as he can. Prim smiles sadly.

“I hope they get together,” Prim says, without a tremor, “Kat loves his bakery designs. She never says it, but she always drags us down there on your fresh day.”

“I’m sorry,” he says, raw and haunted. She walks over to pick his hand up. Squeezes.

“It’s not your fault,” she says, and she knows she’ll die, so she could say more. But she doesn’t. And maybe she’s not so sure she won’t make it, actually. Maybe she has some hope after all. And then she’s sorry for Rye, who saved her life once, but will never do it again.

****

…

“Diamonds,” Cinna says, and Prim shines as bright as she can while she’s crying.

****

…

She’s hopeless in training. She can point and aim a blowgun, but that’s it. If she’s up close to someone she could, theoretically, find all their weak points—but if she’s close to anyone they’ll slit her throat before she has a chance to do that.

They call her the shining girl, but she’s not sharp or hard or precious. She’s just Prim Everdeen. She was born to help, not hurt. How is she supposed to do this? What is she supposed to rely on? Maybe she should just run for the Cornucopia and die as fast as she can.

But who will take care of Katniss?

What is she going to do with herself?

Prim thinks of dark, honest Kat under Cray’s thick weight.

****

…

“Tell me how to win,” she says, steadily, to Haymitch, “Or no one will sell you liquor again. I swear. I’ll say it before the countdown ends. I’ll make sure.”

People love her. And she loves Katniss. She can make this happen, even after she dies.

“You’re smart,” Haymitch says, after a long, long silence, “I can’t tell you how to win. What I did won’t work for anyone else. But I can tell you that if you’re the smartest person out there, you’ll have a chance.

Stop looking at weapons. Look at survival. You’re a healer, right?”

She’s a healer. She knows exactly what things will kill people the quickest, because she’s not cruel, and sometimes in District Twelve—

Sometimes you do what you need to.

She thinks of Cray’s weight.

It’s easy.

****

…

On the second day Prim decides she could kill Rye, if she needs to, but it’d be easier to tell him that he’s strong and he can survive the Cornucopia. Haymitch looks at her stroking Rye’s elbow and she thinks he understands. Prim has heard about Maysilee, because she listens to people talking. They don’t look at each other. But Haymitch knows her.

Prim thought she could live with dying but no one else will save Katniss. No one else will love her sister like she needs to be loved. And Prim volunteered. She owes her sister this much; she owes her everything. 

Maybe she won’t survive. But that doesn’t mean she gets to stop trying.

(If she lives, she decides she’ll kill Cray. They’ll have to let her, if she does it right after the Games. 

If she lives, she knows she won’t really kill Cray, because there are people who need her. But maybe she can make him go away.)

Rye is strong and brave and saved her life already. He saved her whole family. Prim needs to kill him. It should be harder, she thinks, to understand that, but she has also been in charge of amputations since she was very small and her mother had no stomach for it.

****

…

On the third day she realizes she inherited her father’s excellent sense of aim.

****

…

“Stay alive,” Haymitch says, and she hurts for him, this strange and broken man she’s only known for a few days. His eyes are lakes of horror, though. His hands shake when he brushes back her weightless blonde hair.

“Run,” he says, “Run from the Cornucopia. Don’t stop. I’ll get you what you need.”

****

…

At her interview Prim sat as tall as she could, but she was made tiny by the Careers who came before her—almost everyone else, too, because she barely scrapes five feet and ninety pounds. There are children bigger than she is.

But she sat there in her white, diamond studded dress, and said: “I volunteered because I love Kat more than anything. She’s my whole world. I want to go home to her, so much. Could you help me?”

And it was so artless the crowd roared.

****

…

“Slut,” Marvel whispered into her ear, pinning her against the spear stand.

She thought about the irony.

****

…

Prim knows the names of every single person going in with her, so she knows that she’s standing between Hayley from 6 and Ruth from 9.

When the countdown ends she whirls on her stand and doesn’t listen to those little girls dying.

****

…

The worst part of the Hunger Games is that Prim is actually well equipped for this. She’s used to blood and death and screaming. She knows how to shimmy up trees and lock herself in to sleep. Cinna hasn’t painted a target on her back. She sits in about the same place as the clever boy from Five and the tiny girl from Eleven who shatters Prim every time she thinks about her.

People don’t remember her, except—Haymitch wasn’t lying. After the first shuddering night he fetches her a water bottle with iodine capsules (she already found the stream) and a tightly wrapped sleeping bag. With the bag and the water bottle, and her knowledge of plants—

“I love you,” she says to the night sky, to her sister, “Go to sleep, Katydid. Don’t worry about me.”

And she sings her sister to sleep, quietly, not knowing if it’s the middle of the day or the middle of the night in Twelve. She sings to Katniss because it keeps her all right.

The first night kills twelve people. The second kills one. Prim knows that means that things are going to change for everyone.

Rye is still alive.

“I love you, Rory,” she says, because she’s never said it to him before, “Please. Take care of Katniss. And Haymitch. I trust you, okay?”

****

…

On the third day in the arena, Prim meets Daisy.

Correction: Prim saw Daisy well before then, but never talked to her, because she was afraid.

“Hi,” Prim says, now, “Are you hungry?”

Daisy has Katniss’ hollow dark eyes, her sunken cheeks. She has Katniss’ fragile distrust. So Prim calls to the trees when she hears them rustle and is surprised when Daisy actually falls out of them.

And then isn’t, because Daisy is so small.

“Oh, sweetheart,” Prim murmurs, fishing handfuls of supplies out of her foraging, “It’s okay. I’ll take care of you.”

“Thank you,” Daisy says, desperate and wan, curling up on Prim’s lap after her first reluctant feast. Prim offers her berries.

Fourteen down when she stands up. Nine to go.

****

…

It’s not that Prim doesn’t hate herself in a sharp and awful way, after. But Daisy was the youngest of five. Her family didn’t need her like Prim’s family needs _her_.

And it’s horrific and evil and cruel and unimaginable. It’s every awful thing a person can think of and Prim wants to chew her wrists open, except.

Except.

And this is the true horror of the Hunger Games: that you end up wanting to win, after all you’ve done, or else it means nothing.

****

…

Prim is glad that she doesn’t know how Rye dies in the arena, while she’s still in it.

(It tears her heart up like a tractor over a rabbit’s warren but she _can’t feel this_ , she can’t let these things keep happening to her; she loves Rory, she loves Rory, she whispers to him every night and has to keep loving Rory or she is going to tear herself into pieces.)

“Katydid,” she whispers, strapped to a tree with her eyes closed, “Katniss.”

There’s nothing else to say, because she knows her sister will never love her again.

****

…

When she sinks poison into the lake she’s honestly shocked that all the Careers left die of it.

But then it’s three.

****

…

Then Fallow drinks, and it’s two.

****

…

Watt, from District Five. Primrose, from District Twelve.

When it comes down to them it feels almost ordained, like it never could have been anyone else. The clever genius and the poisonous herbalist. It’s a pretty story and a pretty confrontation.

Watt is the first person Prim ever kills directly, at her own two hands, because Watt is staggering and poison dizzy and Prim needs to go home more than anyone else. She needs to think that, anyway.

The hovercraft reaches for her. She goes, not believing.

****

…

They love her, their tricky, determined little healer-monster. They love her and her light hair and pale skin and blue eyes, and they miss all the olive tones to her and the darkness of her blue. Her fluke of genetics is turned into a norm. Her sister is made a freak of heredity. They like Prim pale and untouched.

“I’m sorry, sweetheart,” Haymitch says, gently, and she hates him more than anyone else because he’s close enough to hurt.

And in the same moment she stops hating him, because he saved her life over and over, and he did it while his heart was mulch. He did it while she was screaming and thrashing in her bloody bed, foam at the corners of her mouth, while she bit and cursed and sobbed. He was there. He didn’t abandon her.

“How are my family?” She croaks.

“They’re fine,” Haymitch says, all wrecked and awful, “You did all the right things.”

Then she sleeps without horror, beyond the average.

****

…

“I love you,” she tells Katniss, “Please.”

Her sister runs and runs away.

“I love you too,” Rory says, earnestly, but how is Prim supposed to ever love anything again? How could she even start to care about anything?

She’s shattered at the moment she locked her hands around Watt’s throat and knew he wasn’t going to twist free this time. She’s as trapped there as he was. She’s lost in his wide dark eyes and fluttering mouth.

****

…

Do they even need to ask when they say Katniss might not have to be Reaped?

Not really.

But they do, anyway, and Prim looks at their stark laws and brutal truths and isn’t naïve.


	2. i am unstoppable

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I decided to expand on the premise, because it turns out I really like writing older!Prim.

But they don’t ask her that question at the start. At the start, Prim is alone with the things she’s done.

It isn’t that no one pays attention to her. The people of District Twelve love her even more now that she’s their golden Victor, the girl who brought them Parcel Day for the first time in nearly a quarter of a century. It’s like they don’t remember who she used to be. Merchants clamor for her business now when they used to cross the street when they saw her coming. People offer her babies to kiss for luck. 

Prim is so terribly alone, still, because none of them understand.

She must be happy, though, because she helped her District. She survived. She came back to Katniss and her mother and her boy. 

“She might actually bring some of ours home,” a woman whispers behind her in the market, “She’s a good girl, our Primrose.”

Prim wants to hide her face and cry. She buys Katniss a new shirt instead.

****

…

“Daisy was someone’s Katniss,” her sister accuses, a month after Prim comes home, “You killed someone’s Katniss.”

“But you’re mine,” Prim says, because she thought about it even while Daisy stuttered to a halt in Prim’s arms. “I had to come back to my Katniss.”

She doesn’t say: _they were all someone’s Katniss_.

Her sister is brave and judgmental and too clear, too intelligent. She has to watch what she says around her, or Katniss is going to repeat it to the wrong people.

“You’re not my sister anymore,” Katniss declares, cold and young and heartless, and for the first time in her life Prim thinks, very seriously, about hitting her.

Instead she turns away.

****

…

“Trouble at home, sweetheart?” Haymitch mocks, but he lets her in.

She spends more time under his roof than her own. Katniss can feed herself out of their ample cupboards, and it seems like watching Prim survive sparked a little life in her mother. They don’t need her to do anything more for them. It’s like: her life ended when she was sixteen. 

“My sister hates me,” Prim tells him, “She won’t eat my cooking anymore.”

“Welcome to Victory.” He offers her an ironic salute, fingers to heart to mouth. 

Haymitch had a family. Prim has always paid attention. He had a family, and then he didn’t anymore, and she doesn’t ask how or why. She doesn’t ask if her sister will ever trust her again, because he wouldn’t know.

He understands her, this unpleasant, hateful drunk. He is the only person in the District who knows what it’s like to crawl out of an arena with blood under his nails and filthy hair, then to be handed a glass of warm milk.

She makes eggs for him and he pretends to choke, and it’s awful and not funny and makes her laugh until she starts to cry.

“What am I supposed to do now?” She asks, curled up on the floor with her head on his knee. “No one needs me.”

“Yeah, well,” he says, “That’s not true.”

****

…

Cray’s eyes slide away from her like guilty slugs.

His fear twists something hard and satisfied in her stomach. 

****

…

“Katniss slept at our house again last night.” Rory is balancing his basket in his lap and looking across the Meadow—Rory, her Rory, the second-youngest Hawthorne and the only one brave enough for the woods with her. Prim hasn’t gone past the fence since she came back. She wishes he would stop too.

“I’m sorry,” Prim says, squeezing her eyes shut. “I keep telling her not to—”

“Prim, no.” He brushes his fingertips along her clenched fists, coaxing them open like flowers until his hand curves around hers. “My mother loves her like Gale. I’m worried about you, though.”

“I don’t—” and she stops, for a while, and Rory lets her stop, because he has a hunter’s steady patience. “I’m not who I was when I left, Rory. I’m not your Prim anymore. I’m definitely not Kat’s.”

“You’ll always be my Prim.” He kisses the back of her hand, lips dry and chapped. “I’ll wait for you. I’d always wait for you.”

“I know,” she whispers, and she wishes that he would stop.

****

…

It’s not that Prim stopped caring about Rory, but that her caring is frozen where it was when he tumbled into the waiting room before the train and crushed her against his chest, his heart hammering so hard it echoed in her skull.

The girl who left him was a sweet, patient whore-healer. The girl who came back has killed eight people.

He’s been waiting for her to own herself since they were thirteen and now she never, ever will. She belongs to an entire country. Her life is television and death and pretty clothes. What’s left over for him?

****

…

But maybe she can come back to herself.

Katniss never forgives anyone for anything, but she doesn’t hate Prim forever. It’s just that Prim lives in the space their mother does, a betrayer and untrue. Kat sees the world in two colors. There is one thing and then the other, and there is never any room for things to fall between. 

Katniss comes home, but not to Prim.

This should hurt more.

****

…

Maybe Prim could come back, but whatever quiet, silent place she went into in that arena when she found the bush with three-tipped leaves that would change everything for her keeps pulling her back and back.

It’s safer not to feel anything. This is the place she lives when bad things happen. 

It’s easier to lie in her impossibly soft and impossibly huge bed and do nothing. She wears clothes for days in a row even though she could change twice a day and still have too many. She sleeps as much as she can through the day, sits up in the small hours of dark.

Boiling water exhausts her. People’s voices are loud and uncomfortable. She has no appetite for food.

She hasn’t seen Haymitch in a week when he comes stomping up her stairs and drags her out of bed. Prim twists up in her blankets and throws them over her head, like a child.

“You have a Victory Tour in a month, sweetheart,” he says, rough with impatience and badly masked concern, “Time to wake up.”

When Prim cries he sits on the floor and pulls her into his lap.

“I know,” he murmurs, breath heavy with alcohol, “I know.”

****

…

“I don’t like giving you these,” Haymitch tells her, tapping two blue pills into her palm, “But they’ll get you through the Tour. You have to keep your head up, Rosie.”

No one has ever called her _Rosie_.

****

…

How long does it take her to realize that he doesn’t see Maysilee Donner when he looks at her, but the shadow of someone else?

Longer than it should take her, that’s for sure, but those little blue pills turn the world into a careless blur. 

****

…

Haymitch stops giving her pills at District 7, cursing himself as her hands tremor helplessly and she laughs into the couch she’s collapsed on.

“We got you past Eleven,” he says, rolling her onto her side and swaddling her in a blanket, “That’ll have to be enough.”

Prim doesn’t even remember Eleven, but if Haymitch says she made it through she believes him. He stays up with her all night until she spirals down; he ignores her fingers raking his coarse hair and pours more liquor into his orange juice.

“Just smile, sweetheart,” he tells her, when she asks how she should act now, “And listen, when we get to the Capitol—when we get there, you keep doing what I say.”

He’s not telling her something, but Prim is exhausted enough not to care.

****

…

Five isn’t as bad as Four and Two and One. In Five, they’re accepting. They never expected Watt to come back to them. No one in the crowd is crying.

(Did they cry in Eleven? Prim killed both of their Tributes. She is afraid of what she doesn’t remember; she is afraid of the fact that Haymitch could _do that to her_ , without telling her what would happen.)

In Four and Two and One Prim is a thief.

****

…

None of the Victors hate her, though. Mags in Four ruffles her hair and Finnick tells jokes that make Prim roll her eyes at how childish they are. Enobaria in Two pronounces her a vicious little bitch, and she means it as a compliment. Flare in One gives her a crystal necklace.

She doesn’t have to be like Haymitch, she realizes, as these people surround her and lift her up. She could have a life, still. Things might not all be over for her.

On the way to the Capitol it’s Prim’s turn to roll Haymitch on his side and wrap him in blankets.

****

…

The first time she was here Prim smiled through all of the parties like it was screwed onto her face, but this time she’s a little more hopeful, a little calmer. The Capitol is like a fairytale candy kingdom—not the kind of place Prim wants to live in, but this will be the only visit she makes where she won’t be responsible for someone’s life, and so she can manage it better.

The way they love her in the Capitol is not like they love her in District Twelve.

The Capitol thinks she’s precious and cunning; someone tells her they think she volunteered because she knew she’d outwit them all, and she smiles enigmatically because she knows that an air of mystery covers a myriad of sins. Their failure to understand her is less wounding than District Twelve’s, because she never expected these people to understand. 

And they kept her alive in the Games, with Haymitch. Most of them have no more choice about the Games than the Districts do, she realizes. She may not like or respect them, but they’re not _evil_. They’re people, like she is. They don’t know any better.

They remind her of children, chattering and foolish. It makes her want to be kind to them.

Prim has a heart that’s too wide and hopeful.

****

…

Haymitch shatters a glass on the wall.

“What _is it_?” She asks, frantic, because she’s seen him drunk and mean and dismissive before, but she’s never seen Haymitch _angry_.

“Damn,” he snarls, knotting his hands in his hair, “ _Damn it._ ”

The invitation to Rafael Chantilly’s birthday party lies open on the ground between them.

“I thought you’d have more time,” Haymitch says, refusing to look at her. 

****

…

This is not why she won, she thinks, curled up in her massive shower after. This is not what she survived for. She didn’t think she’d have to do this anymore.

****

…

If this is going to be her life—

****

…

“You’ve got your sister,” Haymitch says, twisting her wrist until she drops the glass, “You’ve got your mother and your boy. Don’t go coward on me now.”

 _You’ve got me_ , he doesn’t say. But she feels it. And how can she abandon them?

****

…

It happens three more times before they let her go. Finnick collects her early one morning (Haymitch must be too drunk) and makes brunch for her in his vast apartment. He cooks himself instead of ordering, she notices that. Prim cries softly into her folded arms—not the heartbreak tear of crying that comes with grief, not frustrated tears that go down hot and sharp, but exhausted, gentle sobs.

“You’re not alone in this,” Finnick tells her, not touching, and she’s always had a little crush on him. “Haymitch has my phone number, and I want you to call me.”

He says: “Just think about your sister.”

He says: “Come on, Primrose, look at me.”

“I started when I was _twelve_.” She hates the whine in her voice like a kicked dog, the childishness of it. She wishes she were stronger. “It’s not _fair_.”

“It’s not,” he agrees, gently, and she wonders how much Haymitch has told him. They’re friends, she realizes. Proper friends. He trusts Finnick enough to have her try to take care of her. Finnick is beautiful; no one needs to tell her what must happen to him, why he’s here. 

He must have been with someone last night. That dries her up fast.

“Prim.” She wipes her eyes on the handkerchief he hands her, absurdly living up to her name. “All my friends call me Prim. I’m sorry.”

“Haymitch told me you were a special girl,” Finnick says, with a crooked, furious smile that sets his bright eyes on fire, “You can cry in here. I’m good at comforting beautiful women, you know.”

“You’re terrible,” she choke-laughs, hiding her face.

“I know.”

****

…

Instead of gathering silphium they give Prim a shot in the arm on the train and say she shouldn’t take anything else for _feminine protection_ , and Prim smiles blankly as her prep team titters over Rory. Her boy. They are so _stupid_ it actively drives her insane.

Ever since she tried to—

Ever since—

Haymitch is more protective of her now, and yet twice as distant. He lurks in the background like a goblin from a children’s story, leaping forward just to growl at her prep team and a frightened Effie Trinket. Six months ago, Prim would have stood up to protest on their behalf.

Now she watches silently.

“I’m moving in with you,” Haymitch announces, as if it’s a huge imposition—and really, it is, she tries to tell him not to, but, “I don’t trust you, Rosie. Your mother is half-gone and your sister’s just a kid, they’re not going to keep you from being even stupider than you already are.”

In Haymitch, that means _I’m worried about you_.

****

…

“I don’t like it.” Rory is upset when she tells him—about Haymitch, not anything else, because Haymitch doesn’t even need to warn her that it has to go unsaid. If she didn’t know about the others it means that no one is supposed to know, ever.

“Why?”

“He’s twice your age, Prim,” Rory says, frowning, and Prim doesn’t mean to laugh in his face, but.

What is wrong with her, that she’s turning into this?

What is wrong with him, that he puts up with it?

****

…

(Unseen:

“Your sister saved your life,” Haymitch says, holding a struggling Katniss by her wrist.

“I didn’t ask her to!” Katniss flares up at him. 

“She did anyway,” he says, shortly, “You’re two years older than she was when she started raising you. It’s time to grow up, sweetheart. Pay her back. She needs you, now.”

Katniss thinks that Prim has never needed her, like a yoke around her neck and a weight tied to her ankle in the water. All Katniss has ever done is drag her down, under. Prim needs Katniss like a knife in the back.)

****

…

Prim isn’t a soft girl. People like to think she is, because she looks guileless and speaks gently, because she has precise, sweet manners and a delicate mouth.

She lets them think that she is, though—or she has, always, because she has found that most people like to feel generous. They like to feel like they’re doing someone a favor. They like to feel in control, unthreatened.

How far would she have gotten with Cray if she was like her sister, her father? How long would she have been able to stay his favorite? 

Would the Capitol have sent her a canteen and a sleeping bag if she had said in her interview that she planned to poison the other Tributes? Would Flickerman have sighed and called her a princess after the Games if she hadn’t cried every day and talked to her sister and boy?

Why would Prim have survived this long in the Seam and the Arena and the Capitol if she was _soft_?

There is never going to be a future where she ends up with a little apothecary shop and a little Hawthorne boy and girl. Prim has to close the door on that, and if she really thinks about it—that was what she wanted, more or less, when she was ten. An honest healing house and an honest family. And she held onto that and onto that, long after she should have known better.

Prim lets it go.

****

…

“I can’t be with you,” Prim says, eyes closed.

There’s a lot of talking after that. Mostly Rory. 

They were fourteen when they kissed the first time, standing in a doorway to get out of the rain. She remembers the taste of iron from his teeth catching her upper lip, how it was good and clean and all hers.

He’s seventeen, she tells herself. He’ll find someone else. Someone who can stay his, who won’t belong to so many other people.

(Rory knew about Cray, everyone knew about Cray, and he didn’t care, he didn’t judge her, but she stands in judgment on herself and is wanting in so many ways. She doesn’t deserve someone like him, she decides.

She’s seventeen; she’s selfish enough not to think that what he deserves may be his decision.)

****

…

Katniss crawls into her bed a few nights after Prim comes home. She’s lucky that Prim wasn’t actually sleeping.

“I don’t like Haymitch,” Katniss says, but Prim is too busy trying not to hope for anything to get it right away.

“He’s—I know he’s not always easy to get along with, Kat,” she says, and when she reaches for her sister’s hand she doesn’t flinch away for the first time in half a year. “But he’s family.”

“No, he’s not.” In the slim light of the winter moon her sister’s jaw is sharply set. “He’s a stinking old drunk who threw up in our kitchen sink.”

“Katydid,” Prim says, without thinking, gently chiding like she always used to. “Be good.”

Katniss chirps. She’s thirteen, and just six months of good food have made her noticeably healthier, bigger, more like a young woman than Prim’s tiny little girl. Maybe she’s too old for this, Prim realizes. If she is, Katniss doesn’t seem to care, because she suddenly throws her arms around Prim and squeezes. Her Kat, as sudden and certain as a summer thunderstorm.

“I’m sorry.” Prim hugs her tight, so tight, and doesn’t mind the wet spot on her shoulder. “I wasn’t mad at you. I was mad at myself, okay, Prim? I didn’t mean it, I’d never—”

“I know,” she breathes, “Oh, Katydid. I know.”

“They hurt you. I let them take you away from me and they _hurt you_ , and I didn’t—I couldn’t do anything, I just had to watch. I’m always getting you hurt.”

“Oh, no. Kat. No. It’s not your fault.” Prim doesn’t like to cry in front of Katniss, but sometimes she can’t help it. “Nothing that happened is your fault, it’s never been your fault. I love you so much.”

“I love you too,” Kat whispers.

It doesn’t fix anything. It doesn’t bring Rye back to life, or undo Katniss’ Reaping, or make Cray disappear, or burn the Capitol down. Prim’s life is still—what it is, she can’t change that with kisses and whispers. 

It helps, though.

****

…

“I think I can do this.” Prim has her hair pinned up when she goes to sit with Haymitch on the porch in the early morning. He’s still drunk from the night before, when he threw up in the sink. “As long as I have to. They’ll forget me eventually, won’t they?”

“Give it a decade,” Haymitch says, staring blearily at the sunrise, “Or more. I don’t know. You’re too damn likeable, you know that, Rosie?”

“I’m not going to leave you,” she tells him, gently, and takes his hand, remembering how he was strong enough to nearly snap her wrist to keep her alive, “I’ve decided. What Finnick said, about not being alone. I don’t want you to be alone, either.”

“I was doing fine before you showed up,” he scoffs, shaking off her hand.

****

…

Prim isn’t soft, but she still hopes for things. She still wants the world to be a kinder, better place. Haymitch’s cynicism touches her, the things she has done have left their scars, but Primrose Everdeen is ultimately an optimist.

Maybe things will be okay. Maybe it will get better. Maybe she can help Haymitch fill the houses around them, with people who are damaged and broken but alive, alive. Maybe Katniss and her will grow back together like twining ivy. Maybe she will lose the hollowness in her chest.

There’s an herb she knows to take for what’s wrong with her—because she knows there is something wrong with her, now, that her mother’s sickness runs in her too, that it was waiting for her before the arena and she just couldn’t see it. It won’t cure her entirely or instantly, but it will help. So she takes it. She cleans out Haymitch’s house while he lives with her. She visits the Capitol again once.

The Third Quarter Quell is announced four months out: 

The Reaping age will be sevens through twelves.

Prim is faster than Haymitch has been in years. He can’t catch her when she runs.

****

…

The plant’s name is _dartbrush_.

The seeds aren’t usually harmful, even when swallowed. It’s not a common bush in the woods outside District Twelve. It doesn’t have many practical uses, except that the thin dried branches can make a good kindling, but what thin dry branch doesn’t?

If a person grinds and heats dartbrush seeds properly, over a slow and careful bed of embers, it becomes one of the most deadly and inevitable natural poisons a person can extract without too much trouble.

Dartbrush is slow. It hurts. You die vomiting and leaking, your throat closing even as you try to be sick. The first symptoms begin about thirty minutes after ingestion. 

She didn’t watch the Careers or Fallow die. She didn’t see Rye in real-time as he smiled shakily and said, “Good luck, Prim”, just before Opal from One closed in on him. And all the others, these people who were no worse than she was, not really. She didn’t hate One and Two and Four for wanting to live, for training their children so that little ones like Katniss never have to die. 

The things she told herself in the arena about needing to go home more than anyone else, about loving Rory in a way that was true and lasting and not the wistful hope of a dying girl, she knows these were stories she told herself to keep going.

Daisy was someone’s Katniss and Prim is a _monster_.

And now they’re going to kill children who will never be older than Daisy was. Who will never have a chance, not even the Careers, to have mud between their toes and frogs in their hands, and Prim is—

Prim is a monster, and they should be afraid of her.

****

…

“What are we going to do?” She asks Haymitch steadily when he finds her only a little way out from the fence. She’s not surprised he knew where she’d go, even though she hasn’t been on this side in months.

“I was going to get drunk,” he offers, and Prim holds her hand out for his flask. She takes a solid slug of it and wipes her mouth on her sleeve, not a princess today.

“They can’t get away with this.” This is what she is when she’s a healer, what she was when she ground those seeds and banked that fire. Cinna said she was a diamond. Diamonds, Prim has learned, are the hardest, sharpest things in the world. “We’re not going to let them, Haymitch.”

“That’s treason.” He’s lilting, teasing, but heavy with dark notes. “Do you know how unlucky that is for a Victor?”

“No one should have to live like we do.” She closes her eyes and breathes in the coal dust that floats out even here, on days with high wind. “This isn’t right.”

Haymitch picks up her hand and runs his thumb over her small bones, over the invisible stains of oceans of blood and sweat and come and other filth that’s lined her skin since she was small.

“I always had you pegged as a heartbreaker,” he says, “Welcome to the Revolution, Rosie.”


	3. lilly, harlan

Being a part of a revolution doesn’t actually change Prim’s life much at first.

Haymitch says it’s better if she doesn’t know much, going in; she doesn’t trust him as much as she used to, but she trusts that. 

So she quiets Kat, who has sparked up into a cold burning fury, and wraps her mother in blankets. Prim is calm, quiet, and, aside from her first reaction, apparently resigned. Why wouldn’t they trust her? She’s never showed a flicker of rebellion before, not really. They think of her as someone who _goes along_.

“What are you going to do?” Katniss demands of her, like an echo, and Prim covers her hand on top of the bedspread.

“I’ll take care of them,” she promises, “I’ll love them like they’re you, Kat.”

****

…

She worries about Katniss.

Her grey-eyed sister twists her hair into a single braid that matches the one Prim used to wear, before the Capitol decided she looks better with more complex styles. She doesn’t shove Gale into the dirt or drag Prim around by the hand anymore. Something in her sister is growing frigid and defensive and closed off.

So Prim sends her to buy cheese buns with fistfuls of money in her pockets.

She hasn’t been by the baker’s herself since Rye died. (Did she pin him in her heart as a debt? No. Did she feel anything for him but liking and respect, gratitude and sorrow? No. She still came home instead of him.) They can get their bread delivered, if they want. She doesn’t want that anymore.

Prim wants to mend things, and Peeta Mellark’s wide blue eyes are honest and true as her sister’s used to be. Gentler, though, and warm where her sister runs to extremes. Kind people like him have a way of winning Katniss over.

She has always had these hopes that Katniss will not be like her.

****

…

People touch her in the street, in the stores. They run their fingers across her like a talisman.

Prim has to stop going out after she punches a man in the throat.

****

…

“Was it like this for you?” She asks, washing dishes while Haymitch slouches in the kitchen chair that’s somehow become his, like the third room on the right upstairs and the cushioned seat by the fire in the sitting room. “All these—expectations.”

They have a month to go. Spring has begun to leave completely, after holding on longer than it usually does—like it doesn’t want the year to turn either. 

“They pegged me as bad luck.” He’s digging a knife into the kitchen table and she feels faintly distressed, even though it’s ridiculous, it’s shades of Effie. Prim’s still not used to having nice things. “So, no. Maybe the first few years they thought I’d do better than Willow.” He paused. “My mentor. Did I tell you about her?”

“Yes,” Prim says, gently.

“Aren’t you a know-it-all,” he mimics a snide Capitolite accent perfectly, and Prim digs her nails into a wooden cutting board. “Eventually they figured out that I wasn’t going to do any better. Which, of course, was all my fault.”

She sets down her washing.

“You saved me, though,” she kisses him on the forehead, “You can’t be that bad of luck.”

He swats at her, irritably, like he always seems to do when she’s trying to be kind to him. Then he says: “You saved yourself. I didn’t have a damn thing to do with it.”

“Haymitch, I think that’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”

“Don’t get used to it.”

Whatever else happens, she thinks, with a sudden adult clarity, she’s glad for Haymitch. 

****

…

The night before the Reaping Prim locks herself in her closet and cries herself to sleep amidst the reams of beautiful clothes she never wants to wear again.

Katniss leans against the door all night, silent but present. Prim wonders when that switched on her.

****

…

Lilly Barrow, 11.

Harlan Thannish, 7.

****

…

Lilly is Seam like Prim, a middle girl surrounded by brothers. Prim has never really had a chance to know her, even in their small District, but Lilly is so much like Katniss it digs hooks sharper than any District Four could imagine under her ribs.

Harlan is a seamstress’ son. He has her reddish hair, his father’s blue eyes. When he was born he started off all wrong-sided, came out dark and silent, so small and fragile. Prim knows this, because he was one of her firsts. She slipped her tiny hand into his mother to turn him the right way. She watched her mother (and her father was still alive, still alive) suck snot from his mouth and breathe life into him.

They both cling to her, because Haymitch is off getting drunk in the bar car, and Prim feels a wild and desperate moment of complete understanding for why Haymitch is Haymitch. 

Harlan’s token is a tattered stuffed rabbit no one had the heart to take away from him. Lilly’s is a thin tinny bracelet her father bought her last year, she says.

The rebellion told her to be patient, but Prim thinks of taking them both up in her arms and bolting off this train. They’re so small. Lilly is trying so hard to be brave, and Harlan doesn’t seem to even understand what’s happening. This must be what they all look like, this way going in.

This year, no one watches the recap of Reapings, not with their Tributes, not on this train. Prim sits with them and shows them all the best foods to eat, shows them how to hold things so that Effie will be happy.

“You little darlings,” Effie says, with her voice trembling, and she’s wiping a dribble of food from Harlan’s face, “You know, you have—you have a very good—excuse me.”

Harlan looks dismayed when Effie whisks out of the train compartment, looking to Prim—who he knows, who he trusts, because his mother has always called her the girl who saved their lives.

“Did I do something bad?”

“No, Harl—”

“You’re gonna die,” Lilly blurts, and then pales, like she’s surprised she said it, but she keeps going, “She feels _sorry_ for you. For _us_. ‘Cause we’re gonna die.”

Harlan doesn’t cry. It’d be better if he cried, instead of twisting his rabbit’s ears around his fingers and saying, in a small, sad voice: “Oh.”

Lilly sobs. 

****

…

Prim leaves them sleeping in the same bed to find Haymitch.

“I was there when he was born,” she says, after upending a pitcher of ice water on his head, and he looks at her as if to say: you think they don’t know that?

Prim has done everything they’ve asked her to, killed and whored and lied, and they still do this. They can, so they have.

She remembers Watt guttering out under her hands. The things she would do to Snow, if she could get close enough.

****

…

“Primrose,” Cinna says, while her girl and boy are being scrubbed down by their subdued, wide-eyed prep teams, “It’s going to be all right.”

Cinna’s never lied to her before. She leans against him and whispers: “You’re my favorite, did you know?”

He holds her like she’s cradling Harlan’s rabbit. Small and fragile and infinitely precious.

She thinks she loves him when he wraps Lilly and Harlan in candlelight, making them look as young and innocent as they are. They have to stand on boxes to be seen over the rim of the chariot. They’re not the only ones.

****

…

There is a taut, hungry rage underneath the smiles of the Career mentors this year as their tiny tributes try to stand tall. The children from District One are nearly naked in the Parade. The boy and girl from Two look uncertain, like no Two has ever looked. The Fours are as panicked as anyone else.

It’s different from the betrayal of the outliers, like her. She heard that Cecelia from Eight nearly killed her daughter’s stylist for his comments about her missing baby teeth. Max from Six is sober for the first time ever, apparently, because his nine-year-old boy is, in fact, his nine-year-old boy. There are a lot of Victor’s relatives this year. 

Prim knows that if she had time and means to ask, almost every one of their children would be ones who signified something personal. 

She refuses to think of them as tributes anymore. They’re Three’s Dat and Gyre. Seven’s Gerta and Larch. Her Lilly and Harlan. Prim writes all their names down as she watches the Reapings on her own—not for strategy, but so she can know them a little better. 

****

…

The question is: why?

The answer is snapped by Cecelia, who is pale in her shaking fury: “Because they want to prove they can do _anything_ to us on national television, that’s why.”

“Snow is a petty, capricious bastard,” Max says, bitterly, and he looks even worse off morphling than on it; she doesn’t know how he’s holding on, “All this shit about fair punishment. He’s just a kinky fuck. It gets him off, that’s what I think.”

“Now, ladies, gentlemen,” Plutarch Heavensbee says, gingerly—and a little condescendingly, Prim thinks, but what does he know about killing his own children, “Speculating on reasons for this isn’t going to help us get your Tributes out of the Arena.”

There’s been a revolution brewing for longer than Prim’s been alive. This is what it takes to break it open.

If anyone else is thinking, _why couldn’t you have started sooner_ , they don’t say it. Prim thinks it may just be her.

****

…

The question is: how?

“Dat and Gyre know what to do.” Beetee pushes his glasses up his nose, looking like the grandfather Prim never got to have. “Max’s Felix and Rubin’s Ampere are our back-up.”

Their secret weapons are eight, ten, nine, and eleven. 

****

…

The question is: who?

Training is even more of a joke this year than it usually is. The twelve-year-old Career children don’t show the overwhelming superiority that their eighteen-year-old counterparts would have. At least half of the kids just play, when they’re not crying.

“You want fats and proteins,” Prim advises Lilly and Harlan, dishing out their meals instead of their Avox, “Any little extra bit of weight helps. Did you go to the edible plants like I told you?”

“Uh-huh,” Harlan nods, eagerly, “The trainer there was really nice. He showed me how if you rub a dandelion on your chin it tells you if you like butter. And I like butter!”

“That’s good, Harl.” Prim kisses his forehead, her nose in his hair, and he still smells faintly babyish to her. “Butter is good for little boys. And girls. Eat up, Lilly.”

“You’re so good with them, Primrose,” Effie says, trembling under her purple wig, after Primrose has sung them to sleep in her bed and gotten up to plan with Haymitch, “You’re such a sweet girl. I’m so _glad_ you’re here, you know, you make it—you are—”

“It’s okay to be sad they’re going to die, Effie.” Prim feels sharply sorry for her, this silly woman who seems so much younger than Prim herself. “Oh, don’t. Don’t cry.”

“I’m sorry! Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t mean to—they’re just such precious little things, Primrose, it hardly seems—I shouldn’t go to pieces like this, I really shouldn’t, there’s so much to do—” Effie dabs frantically at the corners of her eyes as Prim holds her free hand—careful, so she doesn’t cut herself on Effie’s diamond tipped nails.

Where is Prim finding all of this patience? How is she staying so calm?

When she thinks of Katniss it is, as ever, easy. 

In the morning Prim sends Lilly down first, but keeps Harlan with her to watch a silly Capitol children’s show because she heard they would have rabbits on it. He sits in her lap and laughs, a burst of delight that makes the Avox tending the flowers in the corner of the room sneak a look. Prim can’t watch.

“Can I wear these to training, Miss Prim?” He wiggles his feet in his footed pajamas, the ones patterned with loudly yellow ducks. They’re nicer than any clothes he’s ever worn at home, she thinks dully. 

“Just Prim. And yes, you can. I don’t think they’ll mind.”

She doesn’t want to let him go. They have _days_ , and the hours keep rushing past her. She wants it to stop, to go back, to have a chance to change something or anything. Lilly keeps looking at her with her sister’s eyes, her sister’s honesty, like an even smaller version of what Prim murdered her way out of that forest to prevent. She looks at Prim and she _knows_.

They’re going to save some of the children, but Prim looks at hers and knows that it won’t be them. Harlan is the smallest seven-year-old, Lilly was already slowly dying of starvation before she got on the Reaping stage. The Careers are full of fire and the other Victors will do anything to save their own children. 

Prim understands. It doesn’t mean she can take it well.

“You said you could do this, sweetheart,” Haymitch says, roughly, settling down beside her. He looks almost as bad as Max does. “I know you can. You came out of your Games standing. How many people do that?”

“Almost none.” She feels too old for her skin. Cinna has her in pink, palest primrose pink, and it feels wrong when it brushes across her legs. “I can do this, Haymitch. Let’s—let’s just go get sponsors.”

They both don’t say: _I don’t want to_.

No one is really interested yet. They’re waiting on scores, on interviews. They’re not comfortable with looking at what they’ve allowed to happen. 

Harlan gets a one. Lilly, amazingly, manages a four, which is a point higher than Prim did.

“I hit a dummy,” she says, fiercely, “With a mace. And then I said they shouldn’t count me out ‘cause I’m small, because you were small last year, and you won.”

Prim’s heart aches with love.

“That’s right,” she says, “I’m so proud of you.”

Proud of her, for playing a game she has no capacity to win—and if this was any other year, or if they fail, a game that maybe she shouldn’t win for other reasons. Prim knows it’s wrong and she can’t stop.

“I did plants,” Harlan says, rubbing his eyes, and Prim gathers him up from where he sits next to her to hush his tears before they start, “But I was scared and I didn’t—”

“Both of you. I’m proud of both of you. You’re so brave.”

“Do you think they’ll let me wear my pajamas into the Arena?”

“I don’t know, Harl. I’ll ask.”

Haymitch finds Prim crumpled on the roof, her hand around the neck of a bottle.

“They trust me,” she slurs to him, as he snorts and pries her fingers loose, “They _trust me_. I don’t think Harlan even—he doesn’t understand, and Lilly is trying so hard, and I just want to bring them home. Haymitch, I can’t help them. I’m trying and I can’t—”

“You’re a damn sight better at this than I ever was,” he tells her, hauling her to her feet, “You’re right, sweetheart. You can’t help them. But you’re not sending them in afraid. Sometimes that’s the best anyone can do.”

Prim fists her hands in his shirt and knocks blindly against his chest. He smells like pine needles and alcoholic sweat. It’s not a smell she ever would have associated with comfort, but here they are, and he’s all she has in this miserable cage.

“Interviews tomorrow,” he reminds her, “I’ll take the girl. You take that strawberry you love so much.”

She didn’t mean to have favorites. 

This is what it has felt like for Haymitch every year between when he won and she did. This is what he’s had to do, every time. You get to have none or you get to have one. In her darkest, most practical places, she knows that Lilly is the one who has a chance. Lilly is the one she should focus on with Haymitch. She just has to stay alive long enough to be rescued.

“How did you pick?” The windchimes sing all around them. “Between me and Rye. How did you pick? He was stronger. He was smart. People liked him just as much as me.”

“That’s not a discussion to have drunk, sweetheart. Believe me.”

Flickerman is gentle and unassuming in soft gold. The crowd is hushed like it wasn’t last year or any year Prim can remember. There’s a kindness here that might be silly and superficial, but it’s also somehow subversive. She doesn’t think Snow and the Gamemakers fully understood what they were doing.

Caeser Flickerman seems as sad as Haymitch to Prim tonight. As lonely and wounded.

“Tell me about home,” he says, holding hand after hand, in lights that have been shaded down to a warm glow. Every stylist has given up on making any of these children look fierce or sexy or a dozen other adult things. 

“My little brother is seven,” Lilly tells him, holding her chin up, “That’s how old Harlan is, too.”

“Does Harlan remind you of him?”

“ _Yes_ ,” she says, emphatically, “He’s just as sticky and annoying. Little brothers are disgusting.”

“I was a little brother!” Caeser protests.

“You were probably sticky and annoying too.” Lilly wrinkles her nose, and the laughter of the crowd is relieved in ways that reminds Prim that none of them really care about these children. They just don’t want to deal with the messiness of guilt.

“Good girl,” Haymitch mutters next to her, and Prim agrees, because they can’t help them and they know they can’t—and yet, there’s this hope. And yet, they wouldn’t be willing to die for this if they didn’t believe. 

Caeser helps Harlan into his chair, and his legs swing off the edge. Cinna let him keep his rabbit, dressed him in the same white-gold softness as Lilly, with tiny suspenders to hold up his pants. They’ve worked some kind of mousse into his hair to bring out the curls. 

“So, Harlan. What’s your bunny’s name?” 

“Rosie,” he says, shyly, and Prim stops breathing, because his rabbit’s name is _Fluff_.

“As in Primrose?” Caeser’s eyebrows shoot up his forehead. 

“Yeah.” Harlan nods. “She saved my life when I was a baby. Her mommy’s a healer and she was there when I was born. I didn’t come out rightways, but Prim turned me around while I was still in her tummy. And now she’s taking care of me here.”

“You must like her very much.”

“So much,” Harlan says, and blushes like the strawberry Haymitch says he is, “She’s the nicest person in the whole world.”

Prim told him to talk about his mother, about sewing, about his favorite games, about the chocolate he likes in the Capitol. 

“She is lovely, isn’t she? You know, Harlan, that’s a wonderful story. I’m not surprised you like her—Primrose is one of my favorite people too.” Caesar pats Harlan’s hand. “We all love Primrose here, don’t we?”

The crowd murmurs their approval.

“Rosie says we’re family. Me and her and Haymitch.”

When the cameras cut to her Prim can spare a moment to be grateful that her shining eyes look on the verge of tears.

“I’m going to _kill you_ ,” she hisses at Haymitch, shielding Harlan and Lilly behind her in the elevator, “I am going to slit your damn throat while you sleep, you _bastard_ , how could you—”

“Not in front of the kids, sweetheart.” His smile is sick and tilted, but he’s right. So she waits until they reach their floor.

“Effie, take them to the other room. Now.”

Prim has never been this icy with her. It must frighten Effie. But Effie should remember that Prim won last year. _Haymitch_ should remember that. 

“You had no right,” she says, “No right. When did you talk to him? Why did you do that? What is—what is _wrong_ with you?”

“You asked how I could choose between you and Rye.” Haymitch sits heavily on the couch while Prim thinks of how much she wants to hurt him (and what’s wrong with her, what’s wrong with her, what came into her in the Arena that makes her this way). “Do you remember?”

“It’s not the same. Lilly is ours too. You can’t do this to her. You _can’t_.”

“No, sweetheart,” he agrees, tiredly, “You did. I just made it easy for you.”

And he did. He did. He saw the ugliest, most selfish part of her, and he made a decision that she couldn’t. It’s not practical. It’s not strategic. It’s not loving both of them like she loves Katniss, because they’re not Katniss, and Prim has to choose.

“Why,” she whispers, standing alone and apart in the middle of the room, “Why me?”

“Because, sweetheart. I liked you better.” He closes his eyes. “Not because you were a better person, or because you deserved it more, or because you came here for your sister. I backed you because you made me like you. Then you got yourself out of the Arena. You’ve been expecting me to come up with something profound? There isn’t anything, Rosie. There wasn’t a single kid in last year who didn’t deserve to live as much as you. That’s what we have to live with. Or you can try to off yourself again and leave your kids with me. Is that what you want?”

“I want,” she says, shaking with tears she can’t coax out of her eyes, “I want—”

“Come here.”

She goes.

****

…

The question is: when?

“Hey, firstie!” Finnick cries out when she enters the Mentor Room with Haymitch. “She’s here, everybody.”

No one told Prim she’d get sprayed with bottles of fizzy wine—champagne, they call it—and even with everything going on she laughs in shock as she shields her face.

“Stop it,” Lyme says, disapprovingly, and it’s then Prim tastes the high-strung tenor of this frivolity. It’s a ritual, she can see that, but it’s wracked with tinny, false joy. 

“Welcome to our fucked up family,” Johanna says, rolling her eyes, “Sit. We’ve got a couple hours before our kids are up.”

(“Are you mad at me?”

“No, Harl. Not at you. I love you. We’re family.”)

“Are you all _trying_ to make her a drunk?” Haymitch drawls, guiding Prim to their booth. “It’s bad enough with just me working on it.”

“But we love you, Mitchie!” Flare trills. “We do like her more, though. You’re terribly ugly.”

In this room it’s like there’s no difference between Districts—not yet, anyway. They talk like the old friends they are, Haymitch going over to settle with—and Prim sees this with a sick lurch in her gut—Eleven. Since Prim hardly knows any of them, she stays quiet.

“Hi,” says a soft voice by her shoulder, and Prim flinches hard.

“Oh, no, girl.” Seeder slips around her couch like it’s nothing. “You remember me?”

No.

“Poor thing.” Seeder looks at her with sorrow—but not pity, not hate. “I reckoned you wouldn’t.”

“Why—”

“We don’t judge in here, Primrose. Not one of us. You done what you needed to.”

“Daisy.” Prim says. “Fallow.”

“Hush.” Seeder pats her knee. “Cecelia, come over.”

She has to pretend like she hasn’t seen Cecelia at the one meeting she’s attended, and it’s not that hard. Cecelia smiles at her like they’re new to each other, sets her hand on Prim’s other knee.

“It’s hard, the first time, when you’re an outlier. I was a lot like you when I won. The only other Victor in my District was Woof. But you’ll manage, Primrose. No one here dislikes you, I promise. Our Tributes might be competing, but it’s nothing against you as a person.”

“Amazing,” Max calls, drolly, “The mother squad is on the case.”

It’s a game, Prim remembers. It’s a game they’re all playing, underneath the game the Capitol wants, and she has to perform.

“Thank you,” she whispers, trembling and soft, “I was so worried.”

“Good girl,” Seeder says, and kisses her forehead. And that’s how Prim knows Eleven is in this with them too.

She spends a little while mingling after that, guided by Seeder and Cecelia while Haymitch runs his mouth off with Chaff. Prim can see how this life becomes tolerable. With all these people who know you, who know what you’ve done, you find a kind of home. You find a kind of family.

Harlan and Lilly rise up to the Arena while Prim digs tiny rips into the couch she’s sitting on with her diamond tipped nails.

The Arena is soft and lush and full of cover. It looks like a meadow studded with trees and streams, lit by gentle sunlight. Right off the start Prim can identify three edible berries just from where Lilly and Harlan stand.

Cinna—Cinna, wonderful, caring Cinna—has strapped Harlan’s rabbit to his chest in a kind of sling. Portia has done Lilly’s short hair in dozens of braids. Her bracelet is tighter wound and better secured. She sinks into a runner’s crouch while Harlan stares wide-eyed at his surroundings.

But they’re all like that, aren’t they. In the sixty seconds before launch Prim looks at every other child. Flicka from One is pale against her dark Arena jacket. Nikolai from Two keeps his eyes shut. Ampere from Five is shaking with tension. Talt from Ten is kneeling on his plate. They’re just babies, all of them.

Prim wonders how she looked when she was waiting to die.

The Mentor Room is built in a circle, so Prim can hear Onyx of One whispering: “Come on, Glory. Come on. You can do this. Come home to me.”

****

…

Lilly and Harlan make it away from the Bloodbath, but not together.

“Don’t touch him,” Nikolai tells his District Partner, Silva, “Don’t even think about it.”

“I wasn’t,” Silva huffs, prodding their fire while Harlan sleeps with his head in Nikolai’s lap, “You’re such a _boy_.”

Lilly found Felix and Ampere, like she was supposed to. Like Harlan was supposed to.

“No,” Prim says, frozen, watching Nikolai stroke Harlan’s hair while the Ones and Fours look on with terrified need, “No.”

Lilly, Felix, and Ampere don’t start a fire. They huddle together in the windbreak Lilly built and stay warm that way.

The Arena isn’t even as hard as the almost childish one Prim went into. Clean water is plentiful. Easily safe berries fall from bushes at the slightest rattle. The air is never too cold or too hot.

The Arena isn’t supposed to kill them. It’s supposed to be each other.

“Harlan’s alive,” Lilly says, confused, in the morning, “He wasn’t on the sky. We—look, we have to find him.”

“It’s only been a day,” Felix points out, and Ampere is quick to add, “He’s seven. What could we do for him anyway?”

Lilly glances between them both. Lilly doesn’t know what’s happening in this Arena. They sent Lilly in unprepared, unacknowledged. The smartest thing for her to do now, according to a typical Game, would be to eschew her Partner and stick with—

“Damn you, then,” Lilly spits. “I’m gonna find him.”

It’s not part of Felix and Ampere’s job to keep Lilly or Harlan alive. They let her go.

“Glory,” Flicka says, far away, “Glory, you have to stop crying. If they see you crying they’ll—I don’t know, but Glory, you have to stop.”

“She kept screaming,” Glory says, hugging his knees and not so untouchably beautiful as he was, not with the clumsily stitched cut over his eyebrow and the redness of his face, “It wasn’t supposed to be like that.”

Only five dead in the Bloodbath. Only. Prim crosses off their names.

Lyme is the one who chose the boy who chose to pick her sobbing seven-year-old off his plate and ruffle his hair with blood on his hands, and Prim needs to know why.

“I don’t know,” Lyme lies to her, tired and immovable, “Why don’t you worry about your girl?”

Lilly is picking her way through a copse of trees, making so much sound that Prim wants to cover her ears. Her little face is hard with determination and fear. She’s physically fine, though. With all the food in the Arena—apples and peaches and sweet blackberries—she might even be able to keep weight on. She doesn’t have any gear, but in this Arena that almost seems moot, as long as she stays away from anyone with a weapon and a reason to use it.

Cecelia’s Shay watches Lilly march by under the strange blanket the little girl has woven as near-perfect camouflage overnight, cuddling Kit—the second of the seven-year-olds—close to her. She’s only a year older than he is, with two front teeth missing. She’s the only one they’ve let keep those gaps, as if fitting the others with false ones will erase how young they are.

“Shay?” Kit says, sleepily, after Lilly is gone. “Why didn’t we talk to her?”

“My mommy said not to talk to _anybody_ except you, Kit.” Shay squirms deeper into the grassy hollow they’ve found. “She’s a big girl. What if she tried to hurt you?”

Lilly is one of the oldest children in the Arena. She’s not stupid and she scored a four. Prim can call up the odds on her and watch them climb with every hour she stays alive. Harlan, though—Harlan is currently sitting in the middle of six children whose only job is to kill everyone else and go home. And Prim doesn’t know why he’s still alive.

“I’m going to talk to sponsors,” she tells Haymitch, brushing her hand over his elbow, “Call me if anything changes, all right?”

“Something will,” he says, resigned. 

Prim has an invitation to a pastry tasting party in what she now understands is one of the Capitol’s best neighbourhoods—it’s strange to think they have anything but uniform prosperity, but there are degrees of status and wealth even among the overprivileged. It’s hosted by Aurora Demarquis and her husband. (Finnick pulled her aside to say that they’re not ones who go in for Victors; small favours.)

Everything Prim puts into her mouth tastes like coal dust as she watches the Games run on three gigantic screens. It’s a theme party.

“Darling,” Aurora, the woman of the hour, says to her, putting her hands on Prim like they’re old friends, “I’ve made something special just for you. You were so _inspirational_ last year, you know, I’ve been dying to have you visit me.”

“Thank you,” Prim says, demurely, because in the Capitol she is lovely and poised and fresh as dew. “I’m honored to be here.”

They have cakes in the shape of swords and tarts patterned with knives and a fountain that pours a sweetened tea as dark and red as blood. The familiar etching of a three-pointed leaf makes up the fringing on the tablecloths. On couches people are betting on how soon Lilly is going to run across stocky Talt as the commentators draw their trajectories. Melody from Nine is whittling something sharp with the penknife she snatched at the Bloodbath.

Prim has thrown up twice without the slim glasses of purgative. No one has noticed.

“It’s a diamond-topped cupcake,” Aurora says, beaming, as an Avox kneels in front of them both and offers it up to Prim. She takes a delicate bite—it’s airy and sweet, somehow familiar— “I flavored it with sweet rosewater. Careful of the diamonds, darling, I don’t want you to chip a tooth.”

“It’s wonderful.” Prim smiles and dabs a handkerchief to the corner of her mouth. “No one’s ever baked something just for me before.”

If she hides the diamonds in a napkin maybe she can buy—

The sun goes down for the second time on the 75th Hunger Games.

The red moon comes up, and the beautiful, gentle Arena turns.

****

…

It’s not about questions anymore. It’s about: _now_. 

The main cameras are focused on Philomena of Four as she swims in the small pond near the Cornucopia, Harlan splashing in the shallows with his pants rolled up to his knees and boots discarded on the bank. There’s nothing more exciting going on, and Philomena is winsomely sunkissed. The other Careers are planning their nighttime of hunting in the mouth of the horn, sharpening weapons and double checking their packs. It could be almost sweet in another context.

Philomena has about three seconds to notice the water reflecting the dripping moon before the pond starts to bubble.

Her scream jerks the rest of the Careers’ heads up like their on strings, and Nikolai starts up first, face strangely distorted by the new light. 

“Don’t move,” Shay breathes as long shadows reach across the Eight’s hiding place.

A fog boils up from the hedges Apple (Eleven’s Bloodbath survivor) and Dat are probing for shelter. Apple breathes it in first and coughs, once. Then again. Again.

Ampere and Felix hug the tree they skinned up into in wide-eyed silence as a low growl ripples through the woods, not like any thing Prim’s ever heard before. 

The Tens freeze in the mouth of the cave they’ve taken cover in when a shrieking wind throws their hair wildly around their faces.

Prim knows these are something called _establishing shots_.

The cameras can’t keep up after that, and neither can Prim. It has the incoherent rush of a nightmare—which is what it is, which is what it is, this is the dark dreams of children made real.

Nikolai yanks Harlan out of the boiling pond with his bare hands and sleeves rolled up to his elbows, teeth gritted as water splashes across his skin and Harlan screams and screams and screams.

Apple’s mouth is stained wine-dark as he doubles over, while Dat wraps her jacket around her mouth and nose to go to help him.

Kit is torn away from Shay by impossibly long claws that pin his jaw shut but don’t reach to his brain, they don’t, because his eyes are wide and terrified as he kicks his feet uselessly in the air.

Winnow’s ankles are wrapped in the tentacles that came with the wind and she’s gone, just like that, while Talt beats at the grasping suckers with a tree branch on the retreat.

Ampere drops a cracked glowstick out of their tree to reveal things that are almost human, almost, but with mouths lined with razors and skin pale as sour milk gamboling and whooping underneath her and Felix.

Lilly. Lilly is all alone and they go to her, running through the trees, pursued by something shapeless and dark. 

Someone is making a high, keen noise that ought to rip a throat like knives, and it takes Prim a moment to realize that it’s her.

“Darling,” Aurora says, and it will be an eternal credit to her in Prim’s eyes that she pushes the crowding guests away with a harsh look and flick of her wrist, “Oh, Primrose, shh, it’ll be all right—”

“No, no, no, oh, no, _run_ , please, _Kat_ —”

The children at the Cornucopia (not a Pack, not Careers) are scaling the Cornucopia as something howls in the distance—Nikolai is carrying Harlan on his back, and Prim needs to see how bad it is out of the steam, she needs to know where Lilly is, she needs—

“Primrose.” Soft, soft hands on both of her cheeks, a soft, soft voice, strange and sweet. “I’m going to take you to a private room. Don’t cry, darling. It will all be right, you’ll see.”

Whatever drink Aurora gives Prim is strong and steadying. Aurora rubs her shoulder gently, and Prim leans into her for lack of anyone else. She is pliable and smells like sugar, like health, like lavender.

“You poor thing,” Aurora says, “Your boy is seven, isn’t he?”

“Yes,” Prim says, “Yes. And I promised—I promised Katniss I’d love them.”

“My daughter is seven.” Aurora clicks her tongue, and a slight, boy Avox appears. “Get both of them something nice. I’m so terribly sorry you had to see that at my party.”

“You know,” Aurora says, lowering her voice after their Avox (Prim wishes she knew his name) leaves a healthy mound of Games Tokens in her lap, “I don’t like this year. It’s not fair when none of them have any chance. I’ll call all my friends and say they ought to sponsor you. I have a _lot_ of friends.”

“Thank you,” Prim sobs, turning her face into Aurora’s shoulder, “Thank you, thank you so much.”

“I think your Lilly really does have a chance.” Prim doesn’t care if Aurora is lying or foolish or cruel. She doesn’t care. She just needs to hear it from anyone. “She’s very funny, and very brave. And one of the oldest Tributes besides the usual ones! You’ve shown everyone that you don’t need to be one of those crude bruisers to win. I’d love to make her a cake if she’s our Victor, darling. I want her to win—I promise, I’ll help.”

“Prim. My friends call me Prim.”

“Prim, then,” and Prim still doesn’t care why Aurora has taken to her so well, why she beams at being acknowledged, because in her lap is enough to send Harlan burn medication and whatever Lilly might need, if she can—

“May I call my co-Mentor, Aurora?”

“Just Ra-ra,” Aurora tells her, firmly, “And of course, whatever you like. There’s a television screen in the wall if you’d like to tune in again.”

So Prim calls Haymitch.

“I have a sponsor,” she says, dizzily, keying up the television to the horror she knows is waiting, “I have one who wants Lilly and Harlan, Haymitch, we can get them one thing each, so you need to send Harlan burn treatment right away and then—whatever Lilly needs, we _have it_ , they’ll be all right—”

Haymitch says something Prim doesn’t quite understand, so she makes him say it again.

“They’re not sending gifts after sundown,” he repeats, so tired.

“No,” Prim says, “That can’t be right.”

“Are you watching?”

“Mommy,” Shay sobs, huddled in a tiny rock outcropping and clutching her stomach, blood showing where her front teeth ought to grow in, “Mommymommymommy.”

The camera cuts to Lilly, splashing across a stream with her breath coming in great gasps of air. Whatever is following her won’t show itself.

Nikolai is bending District Four’s Eamon off the edge of the Cornucopia, his face inches from the snapping jaws of the wolfish creatures below.

“Do you want to die?” He demands. “I will _drop you_.”

“Please, no, I didn’t—”

“Are you going to try it again?” Nikolai hisses, face contorted with rage. “ _Are you?_ ”

“No!”

Nikolai jerks him up by his hair and shoves him towards Glory and Flicka, huddled up at the tail of the horn. Silva is crouched a little closer, but still. The divide is clear. Harlan’s weakening cries echo in the background. He is, Prim realizes with a sick lurch, the tiny bundle behind Nikolai.

“Rosie,” Haymitch says, “Wake up. Don’t you dare fade out on me now.”

“Tell me what to do,” she breathes, sitting there in ridiculously precious clothes and a full stomach and beautiful hair, “Should I come back. Tell me.”

“This isn’t where you need to be. Keep getting them sponsors, that’s the best place for you. I’ll be here.”

“Okay.”

Prim pulls out one of the blue pills she’s not ever, ever supposed to take or even have, and pops it into her mouth. Haymitch isn’t the only person capable of keeping a secret.

****

…

“They won’t hurt you,” Nikolai says, wrapping Harlan up in his lap and covering his mouth with one hand. “Not while I’m here. Stop screaming, though.”

Harlan wails, muffled, against his palm. Nikolai starts to hum, rocking them back and forth while the wolf mutts howl and shriek underneath them all. 

“I know it hurts. Breathe. Breathe with me. You’ll be all right.” Nikolai tucks Harlan’s head underneath his chin. “You’re brave, right? You don’t want to make your mentor cry. Make her proud of you.”

“There was a man a long time ago, in the Dark Days,” Nikolai says, whispering into Harlan’s ear, “Who lost both his parents because of rebels when he was just little.”

“The District the man lived in didn’t have enough Peacekeepers to protect everyone, because they were fighting for Panem. So the man decided to dress like a soldier and keep the peace himself. He was brave, even though he hurt. Be brave, Harlan Thannish.”


End file.
